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“... that most of these books are hefty enough to be used as building blocks rather than just as reading matter isn’t far wide of the mark. (For the record, the RSC weighs in at 5lb 12oz, substantially lighter than the 1986 Oxford’s commercially suicidal 8lb 8oz, but noticeably heavier than the 2005 revised Oxford’s 4lb 8oz.) Back in the 1620s it was ...”

“... mercy for the Sisters.’ What the film was I’ve no idea. The Crimson Pirate? Doubtless some LRB-reading cinema buff even sillier than I am will be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the ...”

“... The greatest critic of Lawrence this country has produced, F.R. Leavis, was obliged to base his reading on what we now understand were imperfect texts. If we think our national literature important enough to enshrine in a National Curriculum, priority should be given to presenting it in the best possible form sooner rather than later. Seventy years strikes ...”

“... Peter Green’s splendid new translation of Catullus makes quite a substantial volume: more than three hundred pages in all, with an introduction, parallel text in Latin and English, notes, glossary and index. Such treatment doesn’t feel quite right for this ‘new witty booklet, all fresh-polished with abrasive’, as Catullus describes the book he dedicates to Cornelius Nepos in poem 1 ...”

“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... always like that for him,’ the child mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout ...”

“... to be attempting to base conclusions about cultural or social history on little more than a close reading of a few texts. If they do not want to practise other methods, they might perhaps collaborate more closely with those who do. The poetics of culture, as Greenblatt defines it, is too important a task to leave to literary critics, or even to ...”

“... and recorded that too, with cryptic signs. Not only did he like books, with a lifetime’s reading of twenty thousand volumes recorded in his diary: he liked dirty books. Again he felt bad about it and, especially as he approached forty, he used another symbol, ‘the black mark against the day’, to indicate that he had been unable to resist dipping ...”

“... of the word, a handbook; Waters’s notes, bibliographical references and suggestions for further reading hit the right notes and the right works for beginners. His clear maps have been worked up from specialist originals in the Cambridge Ancient History and the Cambridge History of Iran. Welcome aids include a full timeline, numerous in-text figures and ...”

“... far this conception of Pattison came directly from her and how much was taken from Eliot’s own reading of his published work. It is true that Middlemarch was completed before the publication of Pattison’s book on Casaubon. But his interest in Casaubon was already widely known, and his views on the development of European thought had been laid out in ...”

“... the resemblance Thucydides’ merciless analysis of civil war on Corfu bears to Orwell’s reading of totalitarianism, complete with doublespeak, was exploited to some purpose by Thucydideans in recent times; and the classic Athens-Sparta dichotomy he presents has often been cited in order to use him as a Cold War authority on ‘a bipolar world ...”

“... and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last year, each time gathering in new collections and ...”

“... sometimes spontaneously, at worst like tonic water shaken to restore a semblance of lost vitality. Peter Conrad goes in more for weight. You could say of him what the earlier James extravagantly observed of the earlier Conrad, that he offers a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed. In other words, he ...”

“... Seven miles high above the Bay of Biscay and bound for Madrid, reading the daily papers is the alternative to a British Airways breakfast at noon. What is news? A kiss, it seems. England has won a Test Match and Emburey is conveying his congratulations to Ian Botham. It is front-page news for the Guardian but back-page for the Daily Express ...”

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”